Saturday, December 15, 2012

Only 2 more hours until I resettle in Colorado Springs. I guess it's going to be a nice respite from the last 3 months of insanity in New York. But in 12 months and 3 weeks there, I maybe saw any local friends there once. I heard from them much more frequently on Facebook. I reconnected with some people, and survived some pretty horrific stuff (homelessness due to lack of money and to storm damage, and the longest stay I've had at a hospital since I was born).

And with the Newtown school shootings dominating the news, I was shocked to find something else that (assuming 20 children and 6 educators hadn't gotten killed in their school) should have made the news. It seems "Banana Boat Song" singer Harry Belafonte has gone off the deep end. Under the encouragement of self-proclaimed civil rights activist Al Charlatan, Belafonte suggested that President Obama should "work like a 3rd World dictator" and jail Republicans. Not surprisingly, this load of aural crap aired on the cable channel version of NBC News, MSNBC. I have argued for nearly 20 years that NBC and its news division should be put out of business. They have staged news. They have ignored news. They have slanted news much further to the left than Fox News has to the right. They gave a racial huckster a nightly cable show. (But then, Al Charlatan was previously employed by Fox News before he got paychecks from journalism's Evil Empire.) And now they aid and abet in treason by suggesting that the President destroy the Constitution and jail (if not kill) the opposition. Shut NBC and their corporate enablers (Comcast) down now. And while Harry Belafonte may have every right under the Constitution to spout such violent speech, I have every right to state that he should have been at the barrel end of Adam Lanza's stolen guns yesterday instead of those 20 innocent schoolchildren.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Another holiday season, another move. At this point in life, I have done at least 14 interstate moves, with interstate move #15 occurring tomorrow evening. A little over a year ago, I moved back to New York. Within a month of moving back, I ended up in the city's shelter system, and it took over 4 months to get out of that mess. By the end of April, I got a messenger job, and less than a week later, I was back at the rooming house also known as the Oceanview Hotel in Rockaway.

During the time I was a messenger, part of the Northwest section of my hometown burned in something called the Waldo Canyon Fire.

I lost my job after a weeklong stay at Elmhurst Hospital due to a viral skin infection. I had no idea until I after I got out of the hospital that I was unemployed again. While I was recovering from the illness (which took several weeks due to the side effects of the anti-virals), I had to evacuate my home due to a mandatory evacuation order of the Zone A coastal areas of New York City. It was just a precaution, I was told. But most of the people in my neighborhood didn't evacuate. When the storm surge hit Lower Manhattan, it was broadcast live.

It took a few days to discover how badly damaged my neighborhood was. (Check November 5 blog for my photos of the damage.) Thanks to FEMA, I have enough money to resettle. Many who ignored the mandatory evacuation order are now wondering why their aid is delayed if not non-existent. And that's not counting those who didn't live in Zone A and still suffered horrific storm damage. But considering both the city I'm moving to tomorrow and the neighborhood I had to move from both suffered from devastating fires, I wonder if any place is safe. The news this afternoon of what happened outside Danbury in Newtown, CT further questions whether there is such a thing as safety. That situation is still fluid.
And now, people are trying to use this massacre as an excuse to restrict law abiding citizens' rights to own firearms. Do you think a total gun ban would have stopped Adam Lanza from killing people? You think he got his weapons legally? He stole them from his dead mother- whom he killed before the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary. I guess no place is safe from fires or floods or hurricanes or tornadoes or psychopathic killers- or Obamacare or fiscal insanity or NBC.

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About Me

I am an electronic music producer, blogger, writer, commentator, photographer, and an amateur video producer. I have videos on Youtube and 70+ original tracks on HearThis.At and on Soundcloud, as well as a mp3 album/single sales page on Bandcamp and 3 submissions on Indaba Music. My most liked music tracks on Soundcloud are my first original house song, "Up" and a house tune I released at the start of 2014 called "Frustration". 2 of my most liked videos were both shot in May 2013, the first time I stayed in Austin, TX- a video of President Obama's motorcade taken from outside the shelter I was staying at (which was also the first video I ever took on an Android phone), and a film project about Downtown Austin's 6th Street entertainment district. In 2014, I worked in a warehouse in North Austin and contributed music and other stuff to an Austin-based art/media project about low-income and homeless matters called "Am I Invisible". I lived in the NYC area from 1996 to 2007, 2008 to 2010, 2011 to 2014, and from February 2015 to February 2016 after a residential dispute in Colorado Springs cost me my affordable housing (in a probably illegal eviction).